REVIEW | Such Great Heights: Hou Hsiao-hsien's "The Flight of the Red Balloon"

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Like his 2004 film "Cafe Lumiere," Hou Hsiao-hsien's sublime new movie "The Flight of the Red Balloon" finds the director in a foreign country paying homage to another filmmaker. With "Lumiere," Yasujiro Ozu was Hou's reference point and Tokyo his canvas; here, Hou reimagines Albert Lamorisse's classic 1956 short "The Red Balloon" as a Parisian family melodrama. Hou's film, much like Lamorisse's, opens with the magnificent titular object hovering barely out of the reach of seven-year-old Simon (Simon Iteanu); as he gets on the Metro, it floats just above the station, drifting up into the trees. The balloon, and by proxy Lamorisse's film, serves as our point of departure -- our way into Simon's world and our guide through the streets of Paris -- but the delicate, charming, quietly heartbreaking portrait of childhood and family that follows is distinctively and unforgettably Hou.
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REVIEW | Holding Court: Jacques Rivette's "The Duchess of Langeais"

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] A chamber piece for two tragic almost-lovers, a coquettish Duchess and a noble French General. A chance flirtation at a Fauborg St-Germain party initiates an arduous campaign of romantic outflankings, accomplished through feigned illnesses, epistolary sallies, evocations of God, and threats of force. Abstemious with close-ups, "The Duchess of Langeais" is a two-shot duet for Jeanne Balibar and Guillaume Depardieu. The performances are precise in the extreme, the combatants' war games regulated by elaborate rules of engagement, incremental charges and retreats. In visits to the Duchess's residence, they push and pull their conversations between the bedchamber, drawing room, and foyer, the camera softly slipping after. The Duchess, however, has underestimated the fortitude of this suitor, whose continual, nauseous glowering at his loose forelock hides a master strategian.
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REVIEW | Money for Nothing: Stefan Ruzowitzky's "The Counterfeiters"

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Let's get it out of the way first: Stefan Ruzowitzky's "The Counterfeiters" was nominated for a Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar, controversially at the exclusion of a handful of borderline masterpieces, from Cristian Mungiu's "4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days" to the upcoming "Silent Light" and "Secret Sunshine." Though it feels disingenuous to bring up the most notoriously boorish, nonsensically designed of all Academy Award categories when discussing a film's merits, perhaps it's productive to point out all the reasons why a film such as "The Counterfeiters" gets that slot over more difficult, rewarding, and harder to categorize films that would need the recognition to make any waves outside of small, cinephilic circles.
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REVIEW | Grace Notes: Eran Kolirin's "The Band's Visit"

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Though it's both a predictable culture-clash comedy and a gentle plea for people of different political backgrounds to "just get along," "The Band's Visit" nevertheless manages to use its central contrivances and inevitable cliches to its favor, and becomes something ethereal and winning. This debut from Israeli filmmaker Eran Kolirin, in which the soft-spoken members of an Egyptian brass band (the stodgy Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, to be precise) find themselves stranded in a small Israeli town on the way to a gig, parlays its initial good-natured dullness into surprisingly robust drama. Kolirin's schematics, both in its narrative turns and its overtly stylized compositions, threaten to reduce politics to bromides -- yet the filmmaker is wonderfully keyed into the subtleties of human behavior, and evinces a splendid love for all of his characters that borders on infectious adoration. "The Band's Visit" may wear its quaintness too much on its sleeve, but for a dose of what is essentially movie medicine, it goes down awfully easily.
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REVIEW | Caught in the Middle: Andre Techine's "The Witnesses"

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Once again, with his new film "The Witnesses," great French filmmaker Andre Techine surveys the intersections of sexuality and politics, while offering up a compelling study in human strength and weakness. Instructive without ever falling into cheap bromides, dramatic without ever veering into overzealous melodrama, "The Witnesses" is a penetrating, even essential narrative. Techine is fascinated by the ways in which lives interact, personalities cross-pollinate, wounds are compounded, exacerbated, or even healed, yet never in that increasingly mundane American style of overlapping stories that prize fate or coincidence; he paints specifically, creating not vague character sketches but full lives, however defined by enigma or contradiction. Here, as in his superlative (and admittedly more vivid) "Wild Reeds," Techine introduces complicated people who may evolve throughout the course of the narrative but who are also unavoidably wedded to their specific time and place in history.
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REVIEW | The Body Politic: Cristian Mungiu's "4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days"

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Cristian Mungiu's Palme d'or winner "4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days" is as good as you've heard -- ravaging, provocative, deeply moving, and expertly crafted -- but it may not be what you expect. Billed by many as the "Romanian abortion movie" (something akin to labeling "There Will Be Blood" the "American oil movie"), "4 Months" isn't simply about abortion, even if the film uses it as its structuring conceit. So yes, Mungiu's film concerns two friends, Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) and Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), who attempt to procure an illegal abortion for the latter in the waning days of the Ceausescu regime, but it is not an "abortion movie" in the vein of Mike Leigh's excellent "Vera Drake" or Alexander Payne's "Citizen Ruth." Otilia -- and not Gabita -- occupies the film's narrative and moral center, and through this character, magnificently rendered by Marinca and insistently studied by Mungiu's handheld camera, "4 Months" becomes something far more expansive than a simple plot description could imply -- a tense, riveting thriller (of a sort) that subtly evokes the experiences of women in a society that fiercely regulates their lives and bodies, often reducing them to commodities to be bought, sold, and bartered, no different at the extreme from the Kent cigarettes and orange Tic Tacs traded on the Bucharest black market.
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REVIEW | Missing Persons: Jia Zhangke's "Still Life"

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Jia Zhangke, who has emerged as one of the great artists from the "Sixth Generation" of Chinese filmmakers, is one of those directors whose work will always be embraced and discussed by a number of devoted followers but whose discursive, searching approach to narratives and the people who inhabit them keep his films from appealing to a wider audience. At this juncture, I can't recall any of his earlier features creating much of an art-house stir once they found distributors after their North American festival debuts; it's a shame because, despite their refusal of cinematic conventions, Jia's films are hardly ossified, self-contained art works--in fact, today there are no films reaching American screens that reveal quite so much about the state of contemporary China, as important a topic as anything else going on in the world today (despite the understandable glut of films on Iraq and Darfur).
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REVIEW | You've Got Male: Hong Sang-soo's "Woman on the Beach"

It's clear that South Korean director Hong Sang-soo knows a thing or two about human relationships, of longings, self-delusions, attitudinal dead ends, and, once in a very miraculous while, he has a revelation or insight suggesting a new way to conduct them. On the basis of six heralded films, including 2004's "Woman Is the Future of Man" (his only one before "Woman on the Beach" to have gained distribution in the U.S.) Hong has been labeled an Asian Rohmer. At first glance he seems to have learned lessons directly from the French master in how to tell conversation-heavy, behavior-observant stories by means of an "economic" visual grammar, which in Hong's case includes long, patient single takes punctuated here and there by zooms or intrusive (and sometimes incongruously light) soundtrack music.
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REVIEW | Scare Quotes: Juan Antonio Bayona's "The Orphanage"

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] The organic foreboding conjured by an opening prelude torn from the past -- depicting children at play outdoors on a beautiful summer day full of pollen and petals, their caretakers looking on from inside a looming manor -- calls to mind elusive, unclassifiable films like Lucile Hadzihalilovic's "Innocence" rather than genre movies of the horror variety to which "The Orphanage" belongs. Too bad, then, that this beguiling subtlety is quickly upended as the opening credits roll -- kicking off with a big "Guillermo del Toro Presents" banner that signals the film's bald bid to become this year's "Pan's Labyrinth" (a dubious prospect if you happened to find that Foreign Language Oscar nominee overhyped, as I did) -- to the tune of a score distractingly reminiscent of "Psycho" and indicative of the more well-worn path Spanish filmmaker Juan Antonio Bayona's feature debut will follow.
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REVIEW | Design for Living: Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's "Persepolis"

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] At a moment in history where Iran, famously dubbed one-third of an "Axis of Evil" by Dubya, has again been making headlines as the next country with whom the Republicans wanna preemptively rumble (though the NIE's latest report on its lack of a nuclear weapons program throws this political gambit into a tailspin), Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical and surpassingly exquisite "Persepolis," co-written and directed with fellow comic book artist Vincent Paronnaud, is a corrective bomb of beauty launched lovingly into a terrified world. Based upon Satrapi's likewise superlative graphic novels and detailing her upbringing in Iran and eventual departure to (and return from) Austria amidst the Islamic Revolution, the personal-is-political telling deconstructs the absolute Otherness attributed to Iranians in an era scarred by boys who cry terrorist, even as the film rises to the status of coming-of-age classic.
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WORLD CINEMA | The Foreign-Language Oscar Race: Where (Almost) Anything Can Happen

You've got to hand it to Bulgaria, Chile, and the Philippines: Year after year, the countries proudly enter their most celebrated films into the race for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film--with not a chance in hell of winning. And poor Portugal: it holds the record for most submissions without ever receiving a nomination. With the exception of Bosnian director Danis Tanovic's "No Man's Land" victory in 2002, the prize has never gone to a director from a developing country.
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REVIEW | Morning Glory: Zabou Breitman's "The Man of My Life"

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.] Ebbing and flowing on the buzz of one all-night conversation, French director Zabou Breitman's "The Man of My Life" sketches the blossoming relationship between two fortysomething men: the happily married Frederic and his unattached, gay neighbor Hugo. And though occasionally its strength is sapped by heavy-handed symbolic gestures, "The Man of My Life" is a surprisingly unsentimental take on somewhat dubious character types. Just when it seems like Breitman's made another case study in how much the free-spirited homo can teach the sheltered hetero, the director actually manages to free her two main men from the burden of most cliches.
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WORLD CINEMA | Foreign Flicks Checklist: 10+ New Films to Watch at Fall Fests

Searching for the newest, best and most anticipated in world cinema at this fall's film festivals is no easy feat. Let's face it: the year's most significant foreign-language pictures probably already premiered last summer in Cannes. Many of these films will be showing up again in Venice, Toronto and New York--from "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," "The Last Mistress," and "Persepolis" to "Secret Sunshine" and "Silent Light"--and it's often the case that the majority of what's new on programmers' plates doesn't compare. But, of course, with 101 world premieres at Toronto alone, one can hopefully expect another 5 - 10% of positive returns.
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REVIEW | Kissability: Christophe Honore's "Dans Paris"

[An indieWIRE Review from Reverse Shot.] If the critical act can be described simply as the attempt to reconcile in words a personal aesthetic philosophy with that of another as expressed through an artistic work, then criticism comes easiest when a work's flaws and missteps are apparent, the creator's ineptitude runs rampant, or the guiding moral compass is utterly flawed. More difficult is a case like Christophe Honore's "Dans Paris," which is a highly polished, assured film that manages to sustain a series of jaunty aesthetic risks that never obscure the narrative's core of sadness and melancholy.
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WORLD CINEMA | New Crowned Series Offers Hope for International Auteurs... And Peace on Earth

In our increasingly divisive and disconnected planet, the omnibus film has been a welcome antidote of late, bringing together various cultural perspectives and differing experiences into one shared space. Whether "Paris je t'aime" (18 directors), Cannes 60th's "Chacun Son Cinema" anniversary celebration (33 directors), or the New Crowned Hope collection--a series of six feature-length films and one short made in honor of the 250th anniversary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's birth in Vienna--these combined cinematic projects show the possibilities for global harmony.
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Romania's Cinematic Revolution: Struggling Against the Past

The Romanian Revolution of 1989 ended decades of oppressive rule by Communist despot Nicolae Ceausescu, but it took another dozen years before Romanian filmmakers finally found their voice and vision. As anyone knows who follows the state of world cinema, the Romanians represent the newest national film movement to catch fire. Cristian Mungui's Cannes Palm d'Or triumph "4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days," already acquired for U.S. distribution, confirms a winning streak from the Southeast European nation, which began blossoming in the new millineum with work from Nae Caranfil ("Philanthropy"), first features from Mungui ("Occident") and Crisi Puiu ("Stuff and Dough"), and eventually exploding with Puiu's "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu," and the movies of Catalin Mitulescu, the late Cristian Nemescu, and Corneliu Porumboiu, whose "12:08 East of Bucharest" opened in the U.S. last weekend.
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WORLD CINEMA | When the Party's Over: "Red Road" Launches Advance Party, But Other Films Stalled

Rules are the mother of invention, at least according to Lars von Trier. After imposing his Dogma 95 doctrine on dozens of filmmakers around the world and subjecting Jorgen Leth to a number of sadistic limitations (in "The Five Obstructions"), the Danish filmmaker, together with compatriots Lone Scherfig and Anders Thomas Jensen, devised a new set of restrictions to inflict on a trio of neophyte filmmakers. Now well known as "The Advance Party," the project has already engendered Andrea Arnold's impressive feature debut "Red Road." But the creative path for the projects hasn't been an easygoing get-together.
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World Cinema Web: Can Digital Downloads Offer Viable Avenues for Int'l Films?

The diversity of this year's Oscar nominees has sparked discussion about an increasing globalization of the American film industry and audience. With its six nominations, "Pan's Labyrinth" recently broke the box-office record for a Spanish-language film in the U.S., while a trio of foreign-tongued actresses (Penelope Cruz, Adriana Barraza, Rinko Kikucki) crashed the Academy's vaunted acting categories.
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World Cinema: 10+ Foreign Productions to Watch For at Winter Fests

The New Year's hangover has passed, and now the real work begins: Sundance, Rotterdam, Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, Goeteborg, Tromso, and, of course, Berlin and the European Film Market. And that's just in the first weeks of the year. The beginnings of 2007 bring forth dozens of new movies from all over the world. Which ones are gems, destined to break out of their domestic borders and wow the globe? And which ones are over-hyped, big-budget Hollywood-wannabes fated to die an early death? No one knows yet, for sure. But over the next couple months, hours of celluloid and digital video will be unveiled to seal the fortunes of many a feature film.
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REVIEW | Death of a Ladies' Man: Roger Michell's "Venus"

[An indieWIRE Review from Reverse Shot.] Death be not proud. One hears stories of men on their deathbeds who, lucidity gone, expend their last energy on a vain attempt to masturbate; of Viagra-boosted sex that climaxes in cardiac arrest. This stubbornness of the erotic urge, past physical failing, is the subject of "Venus": Why can't I get one last screw?
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